Obituaries Thread 🐐

balbec · August 23, 2024, 5:34pm

Mike Lynch obituary: Tech entrepreneur and adviser to David Cameron

Known as ‘the British Bill Gates’, he was involved in a 12-year legal fight with Hewlett-Packard

The Times

Thursday August 22 2024, 4.53pm BST, The Times

Law

Technology

United States

Lynch sold Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. His share of the proceeds was estimated at $800 million

DEAN BELCHER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

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In May last year Mike Lynch was extradited from Britain to America, where he spent 13 months under house arrest in San Francisco. It was the culmination of a 12-year transatlantic legal fight for the man known as the “British Bill Gates”, who had been science adviser to David Cameron during his time as prime minister.

The case stemmed from the $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion) sale in August 2011 of Autonomy, the business software company Lynch co-founded, to the American tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP claimed that he had cooked the books, tricking the company into paying $5 billion more than it should have for Autonomy. Lynch maintained his innocence, arguing that the powerful American corporation was suffering from buyer’s remorse.

Lynch had been a research fellow at Cambridge University when he started Autonomy in 1996 with a couple of colleagues. At first it was just a handful of “eccentric people working really hard on a project. No bureaucracy. No admin. Lots of late nights, lots of eating cold pizza.” Approaching his bank manager for funds, he was “told to come back when I was older and had more experience”. Venture capitalists were no better. “There were a lot of City people who didn’t know where the on-switch was on their computers,” he recalled.

• Bayesian yacht latest

Lynch in Cambridge in 2000

BRYN COLTON/GETTY IMAGES

Instead, Lynch claimed to have raised the money in a chance encounter with an eccentric former pop music promoter in a Soho pub. “He’d never met me before, but he lent me £2,000 on the spot,” he recalled. “I bought a second-hand computer and, completely counter to the Silicon Valley model, funded the business out of operations from then on.”

Ideas kept coming, one of which was related to digital television. “Suppose you are watching The X Files and Mulder picks up a beer. You can press on the beer and get one ordered,” he said, brimming with excitement at the thought. “Scully comes in. You don’t like her hair? You can have a chat about it with other viewers … People will love it.”

Lynch, along with one of his daughters, Hannah, was one of several people on board the Bayesian, a 184ft luxury yacht, when it sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning. The yacht’s registered owner is Angela Bacares, his wife and business partner, who is among the survivors.

Mike Lynch OBE, technology entrepreneur, was born on June 16, 1965. His death was announced on August 22, 2024. He was 59

Raylan · June 11, 2025, 6:24pm

https://archive.ph/mwaGG

Tassotti · July 11, 2025, 7:24pm

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/07/10/alan-pollock-flew-through-tower-bridge-died-obituary/

flattythehurdler · July 11, 2025, 9:01pm

He had a face you’d like to punch

Raylan · July 30, 2025, 8:31am

https://archive.ph/xypwO

I knew this man to see but had no idea he had lived this life. Passed away out playing golf in Spanish Point last week.

Raylan · February 17, 2026, 1:42am

Robert Duvall at the 2015 Oscars, when he was nominated for The Judge

JEFF VESPA/GETTY IMAGES

The Times

Monday February 16 2026, 6.10pm GMT, The Times

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It took Robert Duvall 12 years and $5 million of his own money to make The Apostle. But the film, which Duvall wrote (in long hand), directed, starred in, co-produced and described as “the most complete thing I have ever done”, confounded the expectations of the studios that turned it down. A gripping drama, The Apostle was dominated by a towering performance from Duvall as a fiery, deeply flawed preacher from Texas who flees a crime scene to seek a new life, a new identity and, ultimately, redemption.

So convincing was his proselytising fervour that there were reports of audiences spontaneously finding God during the film. Duvall recalled: “I had a letter about some basketball players in Iceland who saw the movie and embraced the Lord, right there in the theatre.”

He was a director, a composer and singer, a keen and competent tango dancer, but most of all Duvall was an actor’s actor. He was described by The New York Times as “the American Olivier” and by the critic Leonard Maltin as “one of the most gifted actors to grace the screen”. The Guinness Book of World Records named him “the most versatile actor in the world”. Initially, at least, he was more often cast in supporting roles than in the lead. “Maybe if I had straightened my teeth more, I could have been a leading man more often,” he said.

Duvall was, by inclination, a character actor who preferred authenticity over eyecatching showiness. That is not to say that he did not make every on-screen moment count: in the role of the napalm-sniffing surfer Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, he had only 11 minutes of screen time, but they were the most memorable 11 minutes of the entire film.

Duvall, right, delivered the most famous line in Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”

He was known for his forcefully expressed views on the creative process — he apparently threatened the life of a theatre director and was rumoured to have destroyed the director Bruce Beresford’s chair with an axe during the making of Tender Mercies — but he formed lasting and richly productive collaborative relationships with some film-makers, most notably Francis Ford Coppola.

Robert Selden Duvall was born in 1931 in San Diego, California, the son of Mildred, an amateur actress, and William Howard Duvall, a US navy rear-admiral. He described himself as a navy brat, growing up primarily in Annapolis, Maryland, where his father was posted to the United States Naval Academy. Education was not his strong suit, but he attended Severn School, Maryland, and The Principia, Saint Louis, Missouri, before graduating, in 1953, from Principia College, Illinois, with a liberal arts degree.

In an act of rebellion against his father, he served in the army, leaving in 1954 as a private first-class. Duvall had already realised that his future lay in acting and in 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre alongside Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman (obituary, February 27, 2025) and James Caan. Hoffman and Hackman were his room-mates during that time and they shared a friendship that, in the early years at least, was characterised by pranks and bar fights. Skirmishes and quarrels aside, Duvall counted the pair as life-long friends, saying: “A friend is someone who many years ago offered you his last $300 when you broke your pelvis. A friend is Gene Hackman.”

Casual jobs such as mail-sorting and truck-driving kept food on the table, but Duvall’s intense stage presence soon led to regular theatre work. Hoffman recalled that Duvall channelled his natural state of low-level fury into his work, picking a random audience member and training his anger and animosity on that unfortunate individual.

The early Sixties brought television bit-parts, but Duvall’s first notable film role was playing the reclusive oddball Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird, in 1962. He was recommended for the role by the screenwriter Horton Foote, who would become a staunch supporter throughout Duvall’s career. Embracing the method approach, Duvall locked himself out of the sun for six weeks and bleached his hair to match his ashen skin. During the shoot he met his first wife, the former dancer Barbara Benjamin (later Marcus); they were married in 1964 and divorced in 1981.

Barbara Benjamin, the former dancer, with Duvall before the 1973 Oscars

FRANK EDWARDS/FOTOS INTERNATIONAL/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Duvall continued to work in theatre and television bit-parts for much of the 1960s, but by the end of the decade he started to assert himself in supporting roles in more notable films, including Countdown, Robert Altman’s first feature; the Steve McQueen crime thriller, Bullitt, and the John Wayne western, True Grit. There was a clash of personalities on the set of the latter. Duvall was not a fan of Henry Hathaway’s bullish directing style, a fact that he made known. Wayne, meanwhile, took against Duvall, and threatened to punch him if he continued to argue with Hathaway.

A happier experience, the same year, was Rain People, which Duvall joined as a last-minute replacement for Rip Torn. It was the start of a fruitful collaboration with the director Francis Ford Coppola. During the shoot, the young George Lucas visited the set, subsequently casting Duvall as the lead in his feature film debut, THX 1138.

Duvall reconnected with Coppola for The Godfather, in which he displayed a slippery charm and muscular assurance as the mafia lawyer and consigliere Tom Hagen. The role earned him his first Oscar nomination. It was a rambunctious shoot, with Duvall and Caan initiating an outbreak of mooning. The first instance of bared buttocks — Coppola, Marlon Brando and Salvatore Corsitto were on the receiving end — was an effort to break the tension during rehearsals. The mooning soon reached epidemic proportions, with the apex being when Brando and Duvall hijacked the shooting of the wedding scene to moon 400 cast and crew members.

Alongside Marlon Brando, left, in The Godfather (1972)

ALAMY

With the arrival of the 1970s, American cinema entered a particularly rich period. The rise of disruptive, maverick voices in Hollywood was a gift for a versatile, if somewhat prickly character actor such as Duvall. High points included The Godfather II, Network, The Eagle Has Landed and, both in 1979, Apocalypse Now and The Great Santini. He was Oscar-nominated for both, in consecutive years, but did not win until his fourth nomination, for his performance as a broken-down country and western singer in Tender Mercies in 1983. It was the long-time supporter Horton Foote who convinced Duvall to sign up for the role by visiting and reading the screenplay out loud to him. Not only did Duvall win the Oscar, he also wrote and performed the songs for the picture.

The 1980s brought a new marriage, to the actress Gail Youngs, which lasted from 1982 to 1986. She later described him as “a tortured soul driven by his need for perfection”. Yet it was Youngs who brought the television mini-series Lonesome Dove to his attention after she read the novel on which it was based.

Gail Youngs with Duvall on Broadway

RON GALELLA COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Duvall won a Golden Globe for his performance as a former Texas Ranger, but had a combative relationship with the director Simon Wincer. He later observed: “I’ve worked with three Australian directors, and we didn’t always see eye to eye. But, you know, sometimes when you have a little turmoil, it can turn out better than if everything is in total harmony.”

The same could not be said for his marriages. After Youngs, Duvall married his former tango instructor Sharon Brophy. After her alleged affair with their pool boy, he gave her 30 minutes to pack and leave. In return, she described him as cold and aloof. It was the third marriage to dissolve into acrimony. Duvall commented: “My former wives have been pretty vindictive in the end,” adding: “I’m just not good at marriage.”

The fourth time was the charm. Duvall met Luciana Pedraza in 1996 outside a bakery in Buenos Aires (he had just completed filming The Man Who Captured Eichmann). Despite a 41-year age difference, they immediately connected. In 2002, Duvall combined his passions — Argentina, tango and Luciana — in a film project, Assassination Tango, about a hitman who becomes involved in Buenos Aires tango culture. Duvall directed and starred alongside Luciana. A more successful collaboration was their marriage, in 2005, which was forged on a shared love of horses and daily tango sessions in a converted barn in the Virginia farm where Duvall made his home.

With Luciana Pedraza on the Oscars red carpet, 2015

MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

At home in 1985

BERNARD GOTFRYD/ALAMY

Duvall was fond of quoting his friend, the actor Wilford Brimley, on the age difference: “The worst thing in the world for an old man is an old woman. But when she says action, you’d better come up with something!” Duvall, it was fair to say, was not a man who would tiptoe around political correctness. On feminists he was scornful: “What a double standard. They witter on about having the vote and then elect a guy like Clinton because he’s good-looking and puts through women-friendly policies.” Politically conservative — he attended George W Bush’s inauguration, endorsed John McCain and hosted a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani — he was vocally critical of Hollywood’s liberals.

Yet Hollywood turned the other cheek, and continued to provide Duvall with meaty roles right up until the end of his career. He was Oscar nominated once again for The Judge, in which he played Robert Downey Jr’s ageing father. And while his mooning days were over, Duvall remained youthful in his approach, crediting the film’s wit and energy to his habit of playing pranks on Downey Jr throughout.

Robert Duvall, actor, was born on January 5, 1931. He died “peacefully at home” on February 15, 2026, aged 95

myboyblue · February 17, 2026, 10:00am

Two of a kind those two I’d say.

feck_it · February 17, 2026, 9:30pm

a legend. Godfather 1 and 2 were his best. RIP

balbec · August 13, 2026, 7:24pm

This one is a cracker @Fitzy

Kath Pettingill obituary: One-eyed matriarch of Melbourne crime family

Head of a notorious underworld dynasty who presided over a drug and prostitution empire with dark humour and brazen impunity dies aged 91

Pettingill in 1996

Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Wednesday August 12 2026, 5.00pm BST, The Times

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A diminutive, one-eyed grandmother known as Granny Evil, Kath Pettingill was the matriarch of Melbourne’s most notorious crime family. She oversaw an empire built on drugs, armed robberies and prostitution that reached its heyday in the 1980s, often protected by corrupt police officers.

Pettingill bore the scars of a lifetime on the wrong side of the tracks. Her front teeth were smashed after leaping over a wall to retrieve a ball, but remained untreated. Her right eye was shot out in 1978 during an argument with a prostitute over a $300 debt. That brought the benefit, she joked, of not seeing double after excess drinking. The police joined the humour, naming a surveillance exercise against her family Operation Cyclops.

Several of her ten children followed in her criminal footsteps. On a visit to her son Dennis’s home, she found a young man lying naked with a meat cleaver in his head. Spotting his discarded clothing she called out to Dennis, “Don’t burn the tracksuit. I’ll wash it out and give it to Jamie [Dennis’s half-brother],” before scrubbing the blood from the walls.

Dennis Allen, pointing a gun towards his mother

As a young, cash-strapped mother, Pettingill accepted a friend’s offer of work at a massage parlour. “Later I had sex with some of the clients for money. It didn’t worry me, not for $1,500 a week,” she reflected. When the owner’s car was blown up she took over the business, acquiring a better reputation than the city’s other parlour managers. “She was straight down the line and she looked after you if there was trouble,” said “the Talking Bone”, one of her workers.

A Turkish couple once turned up with their teenage son, the mother crying, for what Pettingill presumed was a rite of passage. Another time she arrived to find a man wearing a bib and being fed baby food. When an elderly client dropped dead, the police, back then still on her payroll, helped to dress him and drag his body to a nearby street, where his family was told he had been found. “Bet he died with a smile on his face,” she quipped. One sex worker came out of her room, her face ashen white. “He wants me to cut his balls off,” she said. “I don’t mind doing it, but I don’t want to do the ten years for manslaughter.”

For many years Pettingill and her family seemed immune to the reach of Victoria police. That changed when two of her sons were implicated in the Walsh Street murders of October 1988 in which two police officers were shot dead. “I hate coppers, but those boys didn’t do anything,” she insisted. “Our family wouldn’t do that. We were not involved. You don’t kill two innocent coppers.”

Pettingill in 2007 at an exhibition of photographs of figures involved in Melbourne’s underworld, including herself

Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Although her sons and two other men were acquitted, the relationship between the Pettingills and the police never recovered. As Adrian Tame wrote in The Matriarch (1996), his biography of her: “Not even Ned Kelly and his gang inspired the same hatred among the state’s police force as Kathy’s boys.”

Kathleen Kemp was born in the Brunswick East suburb of Melbourne in 1935, the eldest of three daughters of Albert Kemp, a timber worker, and his teenage wife, Gladys (née Lee), who ran a sweet shop from where young Kath stole coins. Her sisters were Barbara, who died from polio, and Wilma, who avoided a life of crime. Aged six, Kath wandered into a room where a newly deceased relative had been laid out in his coffin. Reaching into his mouth she twisted out his dentures and tried them on for size.

Albert enlisted at the outbreak of the Second World War and took his own life in the Middle East. Thereafter Gladys neglected her children to embark on up to six bigamous marriages, “largely for their pensions”. Their surviving daughters were cared for by their great-grandmother, also Kathleen.

Pettingill attended Princes Hill High School, leaving at 15 to work in a clothing factory. she soon met Dennis Ryan, 19, who arrived on a gleaming Triumph motorcycle. To avoid charges of carnal knowledge, he married her when she turned 16. By then she had given birth to their first child, also Dennis, who became a multiple murderer, basking in the underworld nickname Dr Death. He died from a heart condition in 1987 while awaiting trial. His mother was furious that he used her new vacuum cleaner to remove the splattered brains of one of his victims from the carpet. “I would have shot him myself if I’d been given the chance,” she fumed. Their second child, Peter, once branded Victoria’s most dangerous criminal, served 28 years in jail for armed robbery.

While Ryan was fighting in the Korean War, Pettingill began a relationship with Billy Pierce, a small-time criminal. “He was good looking and he loved a drink and a fight,” she said. They had six children: Vicki, who went into hiding after giving evidence against the family in the Walsh Street trial; Victor, who was acquitted in that case and was shot dead in 2002; and Lex, a minor criminal. Three others were placed for adoption.

Pettingill, wearing blue, at the funeral of her son Victor in 2002

Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Pierce died in 1968. By then she had two more sons with Jimmy Pettingill, a mysterious figure who already had a wife and a lover: Jamie died of a heroin overdose aged 21; Trevor was also acquitted in the Walsh Street case but still acquired a long criminal record. She broke up with Pettingill in 1967 but continued using his name. By then she was a barmaid at the Sentimental Bloke Hotel in Bulleen, offering free drinks to off-duty policemen. When she realised this would not bring leniency for her boys, she became, in the words of one officer, “an absolute police hater”.

Despite her long connection with the underworld, Pettingill was 41 before she acquired her first conviction, for using premises for prostitution. More followed: assault, living off immoral earnings, driving without a licence and possession of firearms and heroin. “Yeah, I probably hit the cops, but they throw that in anyway,” she said. She enjoyed the relative tranquillity of jail, haranguing the governor, dishing out black eyes to bullies and going on hunger strike in support of a prisoner in solitary confinement.

Her life attracted the interest of filmmakers, but she was unimpressed with Animal Kingdom (2010), especially Jacki Weaver’s Oscar-nominated performance as Smurf, the film’s matriarch. “Jacki Weaver and I have only one thing in common,” she snorted. “Neither of us can act.”

By the late 1980s, Pettingill had retired to a sleepy seaside hideaway in Venus Bay, a two-hour drive southeast of Melbourne. She returned to the city in 1993 to care for three grandchildren when their parents were jailed. Unable to resist her criminal ways, she received another 18-month jail sentence for drug dealing. She had no doubts about her final destiny. “Nothing I can do now will change that,” she said in 1996. “Anyway, that’s where my dead children are, down there in Hell. I want to be with them. I don’t mind. Heaven sounds boring, not my sort of place.”

Kath Pettingill, Australian criminal matriarch, was born on March 27, 1935. She died on August 1, 2026, aged 91

farmerinthecity · August 13, 2026, 7:52pm

Now there is a story.

I loved Animal Kingdom which was based on her family - I never knew that.

Raylan · August 24, 2026, 8:39am

Michael ‘Fingers’ Fingleton obituary: head of Irish Nationwide

Combative boss of the building society who ran the lender as a personal fiefdom during the Celtic Tiger era before its collapse cost the Irish public billions dies aged 88

Michael “Fingers” Fingleton opening the Irish Nationwide’s new headquarters in 1997

Jason Clarke

Monday August 24 2026, 12.01am BST, The Times

Flann O’Brien’s aphorism that banking was the world’s second-oldest profession, but not half as respectable as the first, might have been coined for Michael “Fingers” Fingleton. He acquired his colourful moniker for having his fingers in so many financial pies in Ireland, Britain and elsewhere. For nearly four decades, Fingleton was head of the Irish Nationwide Building Society, presiding over an institution that grew into one of the most extraordinary lenders of Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” years.

He advanced enormous sums to property developers as Ireland’s boom gathered pace. When the bubble burst, Irish Nationwide was left with losses that made it one of the most spectacular casualties of the Irish banking collapse in 2008. Fingleton, who had become rich during its ascent, was duly considered a controversial figure in the European financial world.

From distinctly modest beginnings, Fingleton built Irish Nationwide in his own image. When in 1971 he joined its predecessor, the Irish Industrial Building Society, it consisted of one office in Dublin, with a staff of five. Four years later, he became managing director, and the society was renamed Irish Nationwide. By the end of the century it had 50 branches across Ireland and, under Fingleton’s direction, had grown into an ambitious lender whose fortunes became closely tied to the property boom in Ireland and Britain.

Fingleton ran the society as a near personal fiefdom. Decisions that elsewhere might have passed through layers of committees could depend heavily on his own judgment, and he cultivated close relationships with the property developers who became Irish Nationwide’s most important borrowers. He had a penchant for large deals, great confidence in his own instincts and little enthusiasm for those who questioned them.

As the property boom gathered momentum, lending expanded dramatically, and Irish Nationwide became heavily exposed to a relatively small circle of developers and to speculative property ventures in Ireland and Britain. The methods that had helped to drive its rise were eventually to contribute to its downfall.

Fingleton understood early that money was only one form of currency. Influence was another. He cultivated journalists assiduously at a time when they, particularly freelancers, were regarded by the big Irish banks as not the safest of borrowers. Many found that a mortgage that had proved difficult to obtain elsewhere could be arranged through Irish Nationwide, although Fingleton was no philanthropist and could charge a premium for the risk.

The cosy relationship did him no harm in the financial pages, where his annual results generally received close and often favourable attention. At Christmas in the 1980s, he sent journalists a card depicting himself as Santa Claus, a revealing choice for a man who had become adept at dispensing mortgages while gathering goodwill among those who wrote the copy.

For all the money that passed through his hands, Fingleton was never especially flashy. There were no Lamborghinis or other displays of conspicuous wealth, although by the height of the boom he was reported to be worth about €75 million.

He preferred a more old-fashioned stage. He was a habitué of the Horseshoe Bar at the Shelbourne hotel, where Dublin’s political, journalistic and business worlds rubbed shoulders, and of the nearby Unicorn restaurant, where the ringmasters of the Celtic Tiger circus regularly gathered for lunch. A Dublin wag once described the Horseshoe as the place where “women with a past met men with no future”. In the boom years, at least, many of the men around Fingleton appeared to have futures of almost limitless promise.

By the height of the Celtic Tiger, Irish Nationwide’s loan book had swollen to about €10 billion. Fingleton moved easily among the developers, financiers and politicians who populated boom-time Ireland, and large loans could be agreed with remarkable speed and on terms that reflected his confidence in the borrower and the deal.

His supporters regarded this as decisiveness and an ability to spot opportunities that more conventional bankers missed; his critics saw something much more dangerous. To them it represented an institution of formidable size whose lending culture had come to depend to an extraordinary degree on the judgment of one man.

A warning came in 2007 when Fingleton came close to selling Irish Nationwide to Landsbanki, the Icelandic bank, in a deal that might have valued the society at about €1.3 billion and brought him a substantial windfall. Landsbanki examined the books but eventually backed away, reportedly unnerved by the scale of Irish Nationwide’s commercial property lending. The Icelandic bank that had decided Fingleton’s creation was too risky collapsed the following year in Iceland’s banking crisis.

When the Irish property market collapsed in 2008, the weaknesses concealed by years of easy growth were exposed with remarkable speed. Irish Nationwide was covered by the government’s guarantee of the banking system, yet only weeks later Fingleton collected a €1 million bonus. For 2008, the society recorded a pre-tax loss of €280 million as bad debts mounted, and Fingleton retired the following April.

What had once been presented as one of the success stories of Irish finance was becoming a catastrophe, with an eventual cost to the taxpayer of about €5.4 billion. An economist calculated that if that sum were represented by one-dollar bills laid end to end, they would stretch to the moon and back one and a half times.

The bonus became one of the enduring symbols of Celtic Tiger excess. Under mounting public pressure, Fingleton announced that he would repay the €1 million while insisting that he had been legally entitled to it. He never did. Nor did the disclosure that his retirement pension pot amounted to some €27.6 million improve the public mood. By then, “Fingers” had become a shorthand in Ireland for the banking excesses of the boom and the bill that followed.

Michael Fingleton was born in Tubbercurry, Co Sligo, in 1938, the son of a policeman. From the age of 13, he boarded at St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen, before entering All Hallows Seminary in Dublin to study for the priesthood. He left before taking vows. Years later, he told his daughter that chastity and poverty had not been the problem. It was obedience. He did not like being told what to do.

He is survived by his wife, Eileen, their daughters, Anne and Eileen, and their sons, William and Michael.

In 1961, he joined Allied Irish Finance while studying commerce at night at University College Dublin. After graduating, he worked for the state-run Dairy Disposal Agency, which operated creameries in the west of Ireland while continuing his accountancy studies.

He subsequently went to Nigeria with the relief agency Concern during the Biafra war. On one mission, he was flown into rebel-held Biafra by a “crazy Italian pilot” carrying a suitcase of money as part of an effort to free priests and nuns who were being held hostage. It was something he appreciated later when he became the subject of kidnap threats himself. He qualified as a barrister, though he never practised.

Fingleton remained combative long after Irish Nationwide disappeared. Appearing before the parliamentary banking inquiry in 2015, he defended his record and rejected the suggestion that his decisions had brought the society down. A subsequent Central Bank inquiry into his conduct was permanently stayed in 2019 after a severe stroke the previous year left him unable to participate.

Michael Fingleton, banker, was born on January 26, 1938. He died on August 2, 2026, of a long illness after a severe stroke, aged 88

Raylan · August 31, 2026, 8:55am

Mr Justice Hugh O’Flaherty obituary: judge who had to resign

Irish Supreme Court judge who ruled in the landmark ‘X case’ allowing a raped teenager to travel for an abortion, but whose career ended in controversy dies aged 88

Hugh O’Flaherty prided himself on avoiding the pomposities of the justice system

Sunday August 30 2026, 5.00pm BST, The Times

Hugh O’Flaherty had been a judge of the Irish Supreme Court for only two years when he had to rule on one of the most controversial cases in Irish legal history. The year was 1992 and there was an appeal against a decision of the High Court prohibiting the parents of a 14-year-old girl, who had been raped, from taking her to England for an abortion. The High Court judge’s decision had been grounded on a provision inserted in the constitution prohibiting abortion, under which an unborn child enjoyed a right to life equal to that of the mother.

O’Flaherty was in the majority of the court allowing the appeal, riding roughshod in the process over the literal words of the provision. They allowed the parents to take their pregnant child to England.

In retrospect this was seen as the first victory in the battle to secularise Irish society, curbing the dominance of the Catholic Church, which had ensured that its views on sexual morality were reflected in the civil law of the state. But O’Flaherty, a practising Catholic, would not have had any such general agenda; it was, for him, just what compassion demanded in the case before him.

O’Flaherty loved the law and was learned in it. Yet as a judge he was reluctant to be bound by legal technicalities and rules when they produced harsh results or did not accord with common sense. It was a results-orientated approach not always congenial to legal purists. He prided himself on avoiding the pomposities of judicial office and remaining accessible to all-comers. He also socialised more than may have been wise for a judge.

O’Flaherty’s accessibility proved his undoing when, late in 1998, in a casual conversation with a relative of a motorist convicted of causing death by dangerous driving, he gave advice that led the motorist to apply to the court that had sentenced him to suspend the remainder of the sentence. The irregularities surrounding the subsequent hearing when the remainder of the sentence was suspended led to protests from the deceased person’s family and a public outcry. The chief justice held an inquiry and found that the judge concerned had failed to conduct the case in a manner befitting a judge and so “had compromised the administration of justice”.

The report also faulted O’Flaherty for his intervention. It opined that the re-hearing would not have occurred had he not subsequently inquired from a court official if he had been correct in his belief that cases could be re-listed. It concluded that O’Flaherty’s unwise conduct left his motives open to misconstruction and by so doing “had damaged the administration of justice”. In response, the government threatened to impeach O’Flaherty as well as the erring judge for misbehaviour. Although O’Flaherty was adamant that nothing he had done amounted to misbehaviour justifying his removal from office, he succumbed to pressure to resign. It prematurely ended his judicial career.

Hugh James O’Flaherty was born in Killarney, Co Kerry, in 1938. His mother Catherine (née McSweeney) died when he was five; his bereft, slightly eccentric electrician father, James, farmed him out to an aunt in Cahirciveen on the scenic Iveragh peninsula, where he and his sister enjoyed a happy childhood.

An uncle much interested in young Hugh’s future was Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the “Vatican Pimpernel”, who did heroic work in Rome during the Second World War protecting Jews and others from the Germans who had occupied the Eternal City in 1943 in the aftermath of Italy’s decision to make peace with the Allies and who inspired the 1983 film The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck.

The monsignor’s work was honoured by the British authorities and disposed him to encourage his young nephew to avail of a British government scheme financing the education of lawyers in exchange for their commitment to serve in the Colonial Legal Service when they qualified. So, after school in a local diocesan college, the young Hugh O’Flaherty proceeded to study law at University College Dublin and the King’s Inns, where he was a prizewinning student.

By the time he was called to the Bar in 1959, the winds of change that would be proclaimed by Harold Macmillan in 1960 were starting to blow through Africa, bringing colonial rule to an end. The Colonial Office no longer needed the lawyers whom they had helped with their education. O’Flaherty was left free to practise in Ireland, making ends meet by lecturing students and as a sub-editor for The Irish Press newspaper.

The newspaper was the organ of the Fianna Fail party, of which he had become a supporter when, as a boy, he listened to its leader, Éamon de Valera, addressing a meeting in Cahirciveen. O’Flaherty did his pupillage with a barrister member of Fianna Fail and acquired a good practice as a junior counsel briefed by the state in civil cases. It gave him the experience that allowed him to build a wider practice and in 1976 he became a senior counsel admired for his shrewdness as much as his industry and knowledge of the law; as counsel for the state he was punctilious in persuading the authorities that they should not act unfairly just because the law permitted it.

Fianna Fail had become deeply divided as a result of the prosecution in 1970 of the finance minister Charles Haughey by Jack Lynch’s government on a charge of conspiring to import arms to be used by Catholics in Northern Ireland. While remaining loyal to Lynch, who attended his call to the Inner Bar, O’Flaherty skilfully navigated the divisions in the party; it was Haughey, as taoiseach, who acceded in 1990 to his request to enjoy the rare preferment of being appointed straight from the Bar to the Supreme Court.

Until the events that gave rise to his resignation, it was anticipated that O’Flaherty would succeed as chief justice. He had been conservative, adjudicating on constitutional challenges to enacted legislation, and was kind and sympathetic to those arguing a case before him. A volume of his legal essays published in 1998 bore witness to his capacity as a jurist**.**

O’Flaherty was predeceased in 2017 by his wife, Kathleen, whom he had met when she nursed him in hospital as a young man. He is survived by his four children: his elder son Hugh and younger daughter Brid both became barristers; Rory works in advertising and Catherine is a film producer.

Feeling, not unreasonably, that he had been treated harshly when forced to resign by the Fianna Fail government, O’Flaherty was devastated. A clumsy effort by one of its ministers to appoint him to the board of the European Investment Bank as a consolation fell flat, adding to his humiliation. He became seriously depressed and almost completely inactive for years.

Then, having survived an operation for prostate cancer, he recovered his spirits, once more enjoying his familiar pursuits, playing golf and supporting the Kerry team in Gaelic football.

Hugh O’Flaherty, Irish Supreme Court judge, was born on January 20, 1938. He died on August 5, 2026, aged 88

Julio_Geordio · August 31, 2026, 1:29pm

Any excuse to post my favourite ever intro to an article

binkybarnes · August 31, 2026, 2:37pm

. Who wrote that?

Fagan_ODowd · August 31, 2026, 2:41pm

There’s a heck of a lot of reading between the lines to be done there.

Bandage · August 31, 2026, 2:44pm

Vincent Browne afaik…

Julio_Geordio · August 31, 2026, 4:33pm

Ya Vinnie

Bisto · August 31, 2026, 4:58pm

All roads lead to cahirciveen.

Fagan_ODowd · September 5, 2026, 8:38am

HIGHLY RESPECTED RUGBY WRITER WITH ENCYCLOPAEDIC KNOWLEDGE OF HIS SPORT

Born: April 18th, 1932 Died: August 21st, 2026

In his time as Irish Times rugby correspondent Edmund van Esbeck enjoyed an unparalleled influence; his standing among the primary constituents of rugby in Ireland − administrators, coaches, players and supporters – meant he had a greater reach and rapport than any of his contemporaries.

Ubiquitously known as Ned, he was born in Tramore, the youngest of seven children to Louis and Mary Josephine (née Walsh) and spent the first two-and-a-half years of his life in the Waterford seaside town.

He had three sisters, Constance, Eileen and Bridget, and three brothers, Phillip, Frank and Danny who died in childhood from scarlet fever. There is conjecture as to exactly where the family name originated, but the agreed narrative is that his antecedents came from “the Dutch-Belgian border”.

Ned was inadvertently responsible for a change in the spelling of his family name from van Eesbeck to van Esbeck. The person who hand wrote his details on his birth certificate dropped an “e” So when it came time to get a passport, he had to keep the spelling van Esbeck. This contrasted with his brother Frank, also a journalist with The Irish Times and later the Irish Press, who spelt his name van Eesbeck.

The family moved from Tramore to Sunday’s Well in Cork and then to Douglas. Ned was initially educated by the nuns at St Aloysius’ up until his Communion, after which he attended Presentation Brothers College, Cork, going through its doors for the first time in September 1940.

He enjoyed his schooldays, showing a particular affinity for history, geography, English, Latin and sport. While his passion for rugby would predominantly shape his professional career, he also covered golf for a time and had a love for hurling – he won a juvenile medal with Blackrock in 1948 – and soccer. Truthfully, all sports.

He could rattle off the names of the legendary Cork hurling teams of the early 1940s but, as he said in a podcast several years ago, if he could be granted one sporting wish it would be to see Waterford win another All-Ireland hurling title before he died. Just to put this in context, this from a man whose house in Churchtown was called Highbury in homage to his beloved Arsenal.

Injury denied him an opportunity to play senior cup team rugby at Pres. The death of his father, Louis, from pneumonia at age 55, while Ned was in the latter years of secondary school, was a huge blow for the family, emotionally and financially.

Frank, in second-year medicine at UCC – he was honorary secretary of the rugby club – had to drop out of college because the family did not have the funds to support his studies. Ned took the well-travelled path to London – the antidote to the rife unemployment in late-1950s Ireland − and got a job in journalism at the Exchange Telegraph in Fleet Street, or Extel as it was known, a rival to the Press Association.

He covered soccer primarily including the 1966 World Cup final and several FA Cup finals and when clearing out the attic, his son Declan came across one of his father’s old address books that contained the phone numbers of England manager Alf Ramsay and players like Bobby and Jack Charlton, Bobby Moore, Jimmy Greaves and Roger Hunt.

He was very good friends with Brian Moore, the ITV soccer commentator and host of The Big Match. London also provided him with an even greater love than Arsenal as it was there that he met Mary Treacy, at a Legion of Mary event, whom he subsequently married. The couple later welcomed three children, Declan, Mary Katherine and Geraldine.

Ned was teetotal and had a deep Catholic faith. It wasn’t unusual for him to inveigle a colleague or two to attend Sunday Mass on rugby tours. He was rarely seen without his pipe – he only gave it up aged 89 after a bout of pneumonia – or a cup of tea.

He took over the rugby position at Extel after the previous incumbent moved into the sports editor’s role, but it was a call from his brother Frank, to whom he was very close, that proved pivotal to his career.

Frank informed his younger brother that The Irish Times was looking for a number two to Paul McWeeney, the rugby and golf correspondent. He got the job and eventually succeeded McWeeney, writing on both disciplines initially before concentrating on rugby. He retained that role until his retirement in 1997, but continued to write a rugby column for several years thereafter.

His distinctive style of writing was underpinned by discipline, diligence and an encyclopedic rugby knowledge to sit alongside a contacts book that was the envy of his rivals. He lived those qualities. “I never went to bed without writing my report, so I wouldn’t be influenced by anything else,” his reference to covering a Saturday game with a Monday publication date.

Often seen as an establishment figure, a gatekeeper, it didn’t preclude him from being critical of the IRFU on occasion. No one broke more exclusive stories.

He was proud of rugby’s inclusivity and 32-county sport status during the Troubles, that aligned Catholic and Protestant for an afternoon in Lansdowne Road. He wrote: “Rugby is the only game where you will have the hard-case unionist, maybe from the Shankill, coming down to Lansdowne Road and roaring on the team shoulder to shoulder with the most rabid nationalist.”

He lamented the change in the sport from amateur to professional in 1995.

A huge advocate for schools rugby, he covered hundreds of matches including provincial finals, his words and thoughts cut out and plastered over school notice boards the length and breadth of the country.

He covered 18 overseas tours with Ireland and the Lions, seeing Ireland win both Tests in Australia in 1979, the Lions triumph in South Africa in 1974 and 1997.

His favourite rugby memory was Ireland’s 2009 Grand Slam, Ronan O’Gara’s drop goal for a team coached by Declan Kidney: two Pres old boys. He named Jack Kyle as the best Irish player. Munster’s triumph over the All Blacks in 1978 was another cherished memory.

Among his Arsenal heroes were Joe Mercer, Liam Brady, Denis Bergkamp, Tony Adams and Arsene Wenger. His season ticket for the Gunners has been passed down through the generations.

He had a love of American sport, especially baseball and the LA Dodgers, fostered by taking regular holidays in Manhattan Beach, California, to where his children will return in his honour.

He is survived by his wife of 65 years Mary, his children Declan, Mary Katherine and Geraldine, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

MogwaiC86 · September 5, 2026, 9:08am

Play the Marino Waltz at low volume reading this

Obituaries Thread 🐐

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HIGHLY RESPECTED RUGBY WRITER WITH ENCYCLOPAEDIC KNOWLEDGE OF HIS SPORT